Digging into Browser-based Crypto Mining

Title:
Digging into Browser-based Crypto Mining

(Submitted on 2 Aug 2018)

Abstract: Mining is the foundation of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin
rewarding the miner for finding blocks for new transactions. Monero, a recent
alternative currency enables mining with standard hardware in contrast to
special hardware (ASICs) as often used in Bitcoin, paving the way for
browser-based mining as a new revenue model for website operators. In this
work, we study the prevalence of this new phenomenon. We identify and classify
mining websites on a large corpus of websites and present a new fingerprinting
method which finds up to a factor of 5.7 more miners than publicly available
block lists. Our work identifies and dissects Coinhive as the major
browser-mining stakeholder. Further, we present a new method to associate mined
blocks in the Monero blockchain to mining pools and uncover that Coinhive
currently contributes 1.18% of mined blocks turning over Moneros worth a
quarter of a million USD per month.
Submission history
From: Jan Rüth [view email]
[v1] Thu, 2 Aug 2018 13:43:58 GMT (4693kb,D)